OpenAI has begun hiring for the core team that will help develop The Stargate Project, an up to $500 billion effort to build giant data centers across the US.

The company is looking for a data center sourcing manager (equipment and vendors), and a technical program manager, infrastructure strategy. Neither role has previously been reported.

"Are you the type of person who is excited by massive global challenges spanning thousands of stakeholders? Does driving massive commercial deals across the globe sound interesting to you? OpenAI is seeking an experienced and ambitious sourcing professional to lead our data center sourcing efforts within the InfraDev team," the job listing for sourcing manager states.

It adds: "This role will focus on equipment and vendor sourcing, touching on both commercial and material requirements necessary to build the world’s most advanced supercomputer. With scope covering not only electrical, mechanical, and connectivity equipment, but also critical contractor and engineering relationships, this role offers an unparalleled breadth, perfect for a candidate looking to have maximum impact across an immense capital project."

The role, which pays $340k plus potential equity, "will sit at a critical point in OpenAI’s infrastructure, and organizational, strategy." Candidates are preferred if they have a decade or more of experience leading sourcing for data centers or major capital equipment.

As for the infrastructure strategy role, which pays $270k alongside possible equity, the company said: "OpenAI is seeking an excited and ambitious technical program manager to lead our most ambitious project ever: building the world’s premier supercomputer."

It adds: "This role will focus on infrastructure strategy and site selection, an interdisciplinary field that taps into land, power, construction, sustainability, hardware, community engagement, and much more. The ideal candidate will have worked in business strategy, program management, or capital projects and have a comfort with large-scale coordination, executive communications, and driving cross-company decisions.

"This role offers an opportunity unlike any other: to shape OpenAI’s infrastructure direction and help craft the direction of the entire data center industry."

The hire will be in charge of developing OpenAI's supercomputer location strategy and managing the site selection efforts.

Candidates ideally have five or more years of experience in program management for major projects, including capital projects or hyperscaler infrastructure deployments.

The two hires will join a growing InfraDev team and wider compute effort at OpenAI.

Update: The company is also hiring for an equipment strategy lead, and infrastructure construction lead. Oracle is also looking for dozens of positions for the first Stargate data center.

The Stargate power players

Christopher Berner, who joined from Facebook back in 2017, is currently head of compute, having built supercomputing clusters alongside Microsoft. Renaud Gaubert, who came from Nvidia in 2023, is tech lead manager for infrastructure at OpenAI, working on architecting data centers.

Shamez Hemani and Ryan Brown both joined in the past two years to manage the financing of infrastructure investments.

Infrastructure partnerships and policy efforts are headed by Benjamin Schwartz, a long-time government affairs lobbyist, and one-time director of the CHIPS Act's National Security division. He is joined by chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane.

Alongside those staffers are a number of previously unreported new hires.

Eric Ahlstrom joined OpenAI in December; in the past he spent seven years at Google as head of technical program management for Google Maps, as well as working on Loon, Google's balloon Internet effort.

Prior to that, he spent nearly five years at Microsoft as the director of data center engineering and global architecture. He also worked for Turner Construction for more than six years.

Last November, Davis Wu joined the compute and infrastructure team from investment firm TPG, which has a number of data center investments, including the troubled Quantum Loophole mega project.

Iris Shim joined the compute and infrastructure team in October from Deloitte.

Anuj Saharan also joined the same team the month before, working on Stargate. He spent more than three years at Microsoft, most recently extending Azure's bare metal platform to "the biggest supercomputers the world's ever seen."

DCD also last week exclusively reported that Meta's head of AI compute and storage supply chain, Keith Heyde, has joined OpenAI's infrastructure strategy and leadership team.